Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust
by brundolf on Thursday April 29, 2021 @02:27PM
(#26984639)
I was hoping this would go more into the emulator itself... instead it's more a high-level overview of "things I liked about Rust", most of which are fairly well-trodden
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Depends on your area of interest. How to build a game boy emulator is pretty well trodden as it's usually used as the beginner's guide to emulation.
Here's a step by step guide in JS, for example: http://imrannazar.com/GameBoy-Emulation-in-JavaScript:-The-C...
Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust
by plandis on Thursday April 29, 2021 @03:38PM
(#26985650)
I would honestly recommend not trying to emulate the gameboy if you’re doing emulation for the first time. I did this and it didn’t go very well (but perhaps I’m a below average person)
Chip8 or the NES (6502+PPU) are probably better places to start for beginners.
Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust
by jdmoreira on Thursday April 29, 2021 @05:06PM
(#26986696)
Isn't the PPU very hard? Especially the fact that both the 6502 and the PPU execute in parallel?
Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust
by plandis on Thursday April 29, 2021 @06:06PM
(#26987416)
The PPU is definitely complex but the NES has the benefit of being much, much, much better documented than the GB which is honestly a huge advantage.
The NES also has a bunch of complex cartridge mappers but you don’t necessarily need to implement the most complex ones like MMC5.
Re:Building a Game Boy Emulator with Rust
by arcticbull on Thursday April 29, 2021 @04:13PM
(#26986120)
I've been writing a GameBoy emulator in Rust too haha, though as I've written one before, I'm looking at this more in the context of a static recompilation exercise. Building a GameBoy on an FPGA has been another ongoing pet project.
The canonical reference for anyone building a GameBoy emulator are the Pan Docs [1, 2] -- originally written by Pan, then maintained by Martin Korth of NO$GMB.